inheritance

She got her sadness from her mother

Too much sorrow in one life

Spilt over onto her own

All the way from the Antilles the pain traveled

Settling in her beautiful bones and sweet skin

This restless state of melancholy

Brought about by displacement and death

Welting unwanted scars on the soul

Her wounded heart so full of love

Compounded over the generations
Given like skin color, this melancholy
A heritage of ancient wounds

Occasionally numbed but not healed
She looked for an uneasy answer
Still, I loved that restless look

and the inscrutable charm of her secrets
When her glorious dark eyes looked past me

To somewhere I could not be
 Her moods were mercurial, unpredictable

Quiet photographs captured this absence

This search for anything to make it soften

She got her sadness from her mother

The real dark, ache of forever loss

The heavy weight of never to be
My anxious love reached to share
What could never be divided between strangers

While the world adored her distractions

Only alcohol and passion’s sweat

Allowed her short freedoms
I could never stop loving her
No more than I could end my breathing
Or dreaming or yearning or hoping
Yet, she stopped hearing my heart beat
Seeing me there, seeing through me

She always came home to her mother’s tears